World’s first automated IVF lab may find favor with Trump administration

A startup claims to have produced the world’s first end-to-end automated in-vitro fertilization (IVF) laboratory, streamlining and industrializing the creation of human embryos, which has so far led to the births of 19 children. One of its founders said the Trump administration may be favorable toward the technology.

Key Takeaways:

• A new startup has created a lab where an entirely automated IVF process has now reportedly created 19 human embryos, further commodifying children born through the fertility industry.

• Alarmingly, the startup says it has spoken with a Trump administration representative who offered to remove regulatory "cobwebs" to help expedite the technology in the U.S.

• Though many consider IVF to be pro-life because it creates human beings, the reality is that significantly more lives are destroyed by IVF than the number that survive to birth.

• IVF commodifies children, whether the process is completed by humans or robots, treating them as products to be engineered, created, and sold. Women are also commodified through reproductive technologies.

The Details:

Conceivable Life Sciences (Conceivable), the startup behind the automated IVF lab known as AURA, is touting its success in bringing 19 babies into the world after creating the embryos solely with robots. 

AURA is an AI‑powered robotic assembly line manufactured to perform almost everything human embryologists once did manually in an IVF laboratory. The system has six linked workstations that assemble dishes, handle sperm, locate eggs in follicular fluid, inject a single sperm into an egg, incubate embryos, and even freeze them.​ In the same assembly line, robotic arms transport pipettes and petri dishes with mechanical consistency, while algorithms trained on videos of human embryologists and image‑recognition software can locate viable eggs, choose motile sperm, and direct sperm towards the chosen egg for fertilization.  

According to testimonies by Conceivable, in early studies and trials, AURA’s performance has rivaled prominent IVF labs in initial trials, with 19 babies already born from embryos formed by this AI-powered system. Moreover, the firm has sought to raise tens of millions of dollars to expand the technology, pitching it as IVF’s “iPhone moment,” standardizing and scaling artificial fertility treatment globally. 

"The likeliest path for Conceivable to win over investors, clinics and patients desperate for a child is to convince them that robots will be much better than humans at making humans," noted Bloomberg, adding:

The US is Conceivable’s main target, though. During their conversation, the founders said they’d spoken recently with White House officials about President Donald Trump’s executive order to make in vitro fertilization “drastically more affordable.” A representative for the administration offered to remove any regulatory “cobwebs,” [founder and chairman Joshua] Abram said.

Why It Matters:

The primary moral concern with Conceivable’s AURA is not merely that robots are involved in the IVF process, but that AURA merely expedites the questionable procedure of IVF itself, which already regards nascent human life as products.

Bloomberg stated (emphases added):

Conceivable aims to expand access to fertility care by reducing the number of educated workers it requires and by raising the success rate for IVF, which produces live births only 37.5% of the time, according to 2022 data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The company doesn’t publish birth-rate numbers yet but does say that in single cycles its prototype robots can make embryos that turn into implantable blastocysts 51% of the time.

AURA is not only another technological breakthrough; it is a forewarning of how far society is straying from treating children as gifts to be valued and instead as objects.

IVF regularly creates “extra” embryos that are frozen and stored indefinitely, contingent on genetic selection, or eventually disposed of. AURA’s promise to automate and scale the IVF procedure would enable more eggs to be processed, more embryos to be fertilized, and more cycles to be carried out. 

Automation does not neutralize or remove the moral issue surrounding IVF, but merely magnifies it. Once an IVF laboratory becomes a largely self-reliant robotic assembly line, it may become far easier for people to neglect the reality that each human life handled by AURA is an individual human life with dignity.

Conceivable openly promotes genetic screening, as well as reproductive options for same‑sex couples, broadening the assisted reproductive market to situations where IVF further divorces procreation from the bonds of marriage and the marital act.​

Can You Be Pro-Life And Support IVF?

Zoom In:

A key selling point of AURA is control: greater control of laboratory conditions, of timing, and of microscopic details.

By aiming to reduce human variability, Conceivable is trying to attain more “predictable” outcomes to achieve higher success rates. The AI‑powered graphics and genetic testing facilitated by AURA would reaffirm a dangerous mindset in which some embryonic lives are regarded as “good enough” to be implanted, while others not selected are discarded. 

The physical location of AURA, based in a luxury clinic in a wealthy neighborhood in Mexico City, is very telling of how Conceivable as a startup and the IVF industry as a whole is steeped in the desire for patents, profits, and revenue. By wooing clinic chains and academic institutions in the West, Conceivable is aiming to promote AURA as the new global benchmark for IVF success. Such commercialization is a sobering reminder that once human life begins in the laboratory, it will be at the mercy of external factors like economic scale, margin, and market share.

Although Conceivable’s AURA has already led to 19 births, the joy that naturally comes with welcoming new life into this world cannot neutralize the grave ethical concerns at play with IVF. 

The Bottom Line:

The main issue at hand is not whether AURA can outsmart human hands at creating new human embryonic lives, but whether any system that regards embryonic human life as laboratory material can align with authentic reverence for the sanctity of life.

On this premise alone, Conceivable’s value proposition to the IVF industry, and to society as a whole, must be firmly rejected, with life-affirming alternatives of treating human lives with dignity at all stages.